Vancouver police, RCMP blame each other for failed Pickton investigations

[start_gallery][end_gallery]Elder Eugene Harry of the Squamish Nation looks at a poster of missing women prior to performing a ceremonial blessing at the start of the missing women inquiry in downtown Vancouver in October. CP/Jonathan Hayward

VANCOUVER – The Vancouver police and the RCMP are blaming each other for the failed investigations that allowed Robert Pickton to continue killing for years until he was finally caught.

The two police forces are presenting their final arguments to the public inquiry examining the investigations into missing sex workers from Vancouver and Pickton as a suspect starting in the late 1990s.

Vancouver police lawyer Tim Dickson says the RCMP should shoulder the bulk of the blame, because the Mounties in Port Coquitlam, where Pickton lived, had sole jurisdiction investigating him as a suspect.

Dickson says the Mounties allowed their work to languish for months at a time, doing very little to investigate Pickton after 1999.

RCMP, on the other hand, say their officers did the best they could with the information they had at the time, and Vancouver police should be blamed for not realizing sooner that a serial killer was at work.

RCMP lawyer Cheryl Tobias says if the Vancouver police leadership had recognized that sooner, the two forces would have formed a joint investigation earlier than they did in 2001.

Both forces have offered apologies for not catching Pickton sooner, but have also said their officers shouldn’t be judged or blamed with the benefit of hindsight.